There are numerous imaging applications that involve three dimensional (3D) scene reconstruction. These include, for example, augmented reality applications, scene understanding applications, and robotic imaging and navigation applications, to name a few. The increasing availability of lower cost 3D cameras, or “depth cameras,” enable the hosting of such applications on a wide variety of platforms including mobile platforms that facilitate image capture from many perspectives. Typically, however, there are at least some regions of the scene that fail to be fully captured or are of relatively poor image quality. This may happen as a result of occlusions, clutter, or poor viewing angles. Additionally, camera and sensor limitations can introduce pixel noise and produce incomplete depth maps. These problems can result in partial scans of objects in the scene, degraded scene reconstruction, and failure of follow on applications, such as scene understanding algorithms, to perform correctly on the reconstructed scene.
Although the following Detailed Description will proceed with reference being made to illustrative embodiments, many alternatives, modifications, and variations thereof will be apparent in light of this disclosure.